Doomsday Warrior 06 - American Rebellion (15 page)

“Which way Rockson?”
Carnivore asked, as the elephant-sized creatures spread out in a long line, their hunger already growing for more of the tasty creatures they had eaten yesterday.

“Straight through that fence there,” Rock said, pointing to a dumpsite a mile off, “and then into the fort. I don’t think with a backup team like you guys we really need much of a plan. Please, you have instructed your men not to eat the slaves—only the Germans.”

“Of course Rockson
,” the green slime thing answered back, towering over the Freefighter who stood several yards away.
“We are monsters but we’re not savages. Besides Germans are tastier—and fatter.”

Rock walked ahead of the field full of moving slime things, he and Rona having to doubletime it to keep up with the huge step of the Nagras’ legs. He felt a deep satisfaction that he was returning to help the slaves. That they would see he hadn’t broken his word—that he had returned. He just prayed there were some left to save.

They came to the first gate blocking the garbage collection site and the lead Nagra knocked down the ten-foot high, iron link gate as if it were a twig, bending the six-inch thick steel beams over like rubber. The rest followed behind Rockson as he ran down the two-lane dirt road that led to the fort. The lights of Goerringrad twinkled desperately in the black night ahead.

The five guards on duty at the western entrance to the fort sat around their machine-gun emplacement, covered with blankets. It was cold here in America. Too fucking cold. It was one thing to come and fight and carry out the Führer’s grand military plan—but they had done nothing but guard this old backyard that led to the swamps, for months. When the hell would something happen. Something they could write home to their girlfriends about—something that would make them proud, make them men. The small crackling fire in their center, around which they all sat, puffed out little clouds of blue smoke as the resins of the half-dried pine they’d thrown on caught and exploded with bullet-like snaps.

“Ach, I am disgusted, Heimmel. I want to fight, I want to feel the shells going off around me, the smell of blood and gunpowder in the air. The blood-red sun of victory rising over my shoulder, as the Führer himself wrote about. The glory of fighting for the Fatherland, heroic Teutonic knights carrying out our sacred mission of world unity and purification.” His face suddenly changed from animated and firm to a look of the sheerest horror in the space of a second. His mouth dropped open as his eyes focused on the horrors he was seeing coming up the road. The others turned with a start and caught the same frozen expression as if it was a disease. A disease of terror. What does a man do when an army of dead, hideous giants, made out of the foulest mould and slime is coming to kill him? They sat paralyzed in a frieze of blind terror, their heartspeeds nearly tripling in seconds, their faces draining of blood. They were about to get their wish to die for the Fatherland—but not in a very heroic way.

The things were almost upon them, impossible, nightmarish creatures with reaching dripping arms of sludge, and mouths that opened to consume—bottomless—teeth of black fungus. The five guards somehow snapped out of their trance of doom and swung their Kalashnikovs around, shooting wildly on full auto. The slugs tore right into the first four or five of the Narga and settled in the center of their swamp chests and stomachs, just another addition to the filthy mound. One of the hideous creatures reached into the emplacement and lifted two of the Germans out. He squeezed them both, his hands fitting completely around their chests, squeezed until their chests caved in, and their hearts and lungs were condensed into a bloody putty which sprayed out the men’s noses, mouths and eyes. Another Narga picked up two more, slamming one right into his mouth, feet first. The man screamed a sound that cut through the air like a razor as the cavernous mouth chewed him down in four quick bites. Just the head was left at the very edge still screaming—then it too disappeared inside with a quick slurp.

The fifth man leaped from the sandbagged emplacement and ran down the fortress road, his legs pumping like a jackrabbit. But a ten-foot swamp being caught up with him in a flash and ripped the man from the ground, holding the trembling and crying soldier up to its dark red eyes. It let out a wet sound as its mouth opened wide, trying to decide whether to start on the brain or the inner organs. It chose the latter, and clamped down its shark-sized jaws over the man’s stomach, sucking in the soupy organs with delight as half the remains dribbled down its green front.

“Come on,” Rockson yelled, heading toward the main gate of the fortress. “Just this gate and we’re inside. You get rid of the Nazis—I’ll get the slaves out. Carnivore,” he said, stopping just before the electrified main defense gate, “if I never see you again, thank you. Your name will be known to the descendants of this—someday free America—that you and your people were one of the groups that contributed to our freedom—fought to free others. We are keeping new history records in my city and well, it’s not for nothing, I promise you that.”

“My pleasure Rockson,”
the immense being answered. It constantly amazed the Doomsday Warrior how something so fearsome, so able to kill with incredible power, so hideous, was possessed with such a civilized mind. A thinker, a poet, trapped inside an ultimate deformity.
“It has been good to know you. I have learned from you. Even in our wretched states—one exists, and knowledge, seeing more, taking in the things around us—there is nothing else. At least for me.”

“I hope you get your wish for peace,” Rockson said softly, not wanting to say the word death, as he had grown to like the swamp thing and didn’t hanker to the notion of its kicking off.

“It is all in the god Megapoison’s hands.”

The huge thing turned with astounding grace, considering its mass, and pushed over the gate just by extending an arm. The electric current of the fence arced through Nitrogen Carnivore, sending white sparks whipping around its body, supercharged by all the moisture. It was hardly more than a tickle. The army of green death drove into Fort Goerringrad bent on nothing less than annihilation. They came up to the first few buildings at the edge of the fortress and smashed through the concrete walls as if they were made of paper. The sleeping guards inside woke to find themselves enveloped in steel arms of slime, and then, accompanied by loud crunching noises, they were dead.

The Narga went wild, thrashing their arms, slamming out at everything in sight. They had never been able to use their full strength and let loose with everything they had. They had bottled up all the murderous hatred and twisted madness that lay inside them. And that had added to the festering poison and decay of their souls. But now they could let it all come out. Now they could kill, and kill again.

The Germans didn’t know what hit them. Everywhere, the Nagra burst through walls, windows, smashed down gates, grabbing every German they found, ripping out their throats with a single quick bite and then throwing the bodies to the ground, mentally noting where they had left them, for future collection. The barracks of the German officers was left in a sea of blood, which ran out the door and into the street—fingers and eyeballs floating in its rushing streams. Those that didn’t die instantly wished they had when they came face to face with one of the creatures and saw what was about to consume them. They backed off with their hands in front of their faces, half mad with fear, reverting to childhood states, crying for their Maters and Paters. But the swamp mutations didn’t respond well to tears—except as flavoring—and the Nazis were chewed up, spat out and left for a midnight snack.

The fortress crumbled beneath the onslaught. It was as if a tornado—a hundred tornadoes—were going through it, wrecking, obliterating everything they touched, turning buildings to dust, bodies to blood. In their last seconds of life, the dying Germans prayed to a God they hadn’t thought of for years. The Christian God, vestige of the distant past, but which their parents and their parents’ parents had still followed. These Germans prayed to a God to whom
they
were the antichrist—and he did not hear them. They had built their own concentration camp—and now they would die in it.

Rockson rushed through the demolished gate and toward the slaves’ section of the city. He and Rona had rearmed themselves with the weapons of the first-killed Germans, a submachine gun each, German Lugers and a few potato mashers. They tore ass down the main thoroughfare as the Narga wreaked their hellish destruction all around. A few guards heading toward the sound of the fighting spotted Rock, but Rona’s and Rock’s subs spoke death and more bodies joined in the festivities. Rock didn’t even know what the slaves would do. Most of them were already gone—their brains and hearts little more than withered nonfunctioning organs. But he’d have to try. And so would they. Because they weren’t going to have any choice about it.

He tore into the first of the barracks and let loose a volley from his sub which ripped like metal teeth into the soft rotting concrete ceiling.

“Time to go, boys. Name’s Ted Rockson, you may or may not have heard of me. But I’m here to free your fucking asses whether you want to or not. You, to put it bluntly, no longer have a master. The Nazis are retiring from the slave business as of tonight. Get out of here. Run, into the hills, the mountains. You’re on your own now. It’s up to you, live or die—as men or beasts.” He turned as the amazed eyes stared up at him speechlessly. Rockson went through every slave barracks from A–G, telling inhabitants the same thing. Not accustomed to thinking for themselves, they milled around in confusion and out into the streets not really wanting to leave the fortress. That is until they saw the first lines of the Narga coming nearer. They trampled each other heading the other way.

Rock grew increasingly nervous as he reached his old barracks. Had they all died, left there in the basement? He jumped into the huge room and again fired the sub. The men, already awake from the fighting, sat up.

“It is him,” one of them screamed. “He has returned. See—I told you—The Rockson has returned.” He jumped up and rushed over to Rockson, kissing his hand, which the Doomsday Warrior pulled away in disgust.

“You!” He recognized the man as one who had joined him in the ill-fated rebellion. “They didn’t kill all of you when I left?”

“No—they needed us too bad. We were whipped and had electric shock to our—but other than the 12 men who died down in the basement and of course Lyons whom they took away—they just sent us back to work.”

“And Lyons—what happened to him?” Rockson asked anxiously of the only one in the whole place who seemed really salvagable.

“Oh they took him to the House of Pain. He has been the Screamer this week. For three days now. His are the screams we must work to—that are broadcast all day.”

Rock told them all the same thing he had to the others. It was their choice now whether to live or die. Then he rushed toward the pain center in the central square, the place where uncooperative prisoners were taken for “treatment” or disposal. He turned the corner to the building with his sub by his side, Rona running a step behind, her long red hair tied back with twine, in a thick ponytail, her right hand holding a grenade, pin pulled ready for quick release. The three guards at the front entrance to the cylindrical tower where Rona had spent her time as goddess in residence on the 10th floor didn’t have a chance. She released her hardball and the two Freefighters dove to the ground. With a three-second delay, the Germans barely had time to hear the click as the grenade hit the ground and see just what it was that was about to take them out. Then it took them out—a spray of blood, bone and cartilage coated the outer stainless steel curved wall of the tower. The two Free Americans rushed over the dismembered heaps and up the stairs, unleashing a spray from both submachine guns as they came bursting through the door. Two more guards waiting inside took slugs to the face and chest before they even saw their opponents and flew backward, sliding along the well-waxed lobby floor.

“It’s on the next floor up,” Rona yelled. “I heard the screams at night sometimes myself from down below. Coming right up through the walls and floors, I swear, like ghosts.” They shot open the locked door to the second floor and tore in, stepping over the corpse of the man who had been waiting on the other side, his pistol cocked.

They rushed down a hallway of padded rooms, each filled with humans or the remains of those that the S.S. had had their way with. In the seventh small cubicle they found Lyons.

“Oh Jesus,” Rona gasped, as she saw the bloody remnants of a human being. But the bashed-in face, the teeth missing, one eye swollen as large as a black egg, smiled up at them.

“You came back. Rockson. They told me, the S.S., that you had betrayed me. That, as miserable as my life was, you had made it even worse and had lied and deserted us all. But I told them no and even in the midst of what they did to me—the knowledge that you were coming—that got me through it. A man needs something to believe in—or else there is nothing.”

“I came back,” Rock said softly, cradling the barely moving man’s head as he cut the cords that bound him to the steel ribbed chair. “I want you to know that I didn’t try to escape from the basement when you were all trapped. Rona fell onto the tube car and I jumped on to help her—the thing took off. There was no time—”

Lyons cut him off. “It’s okay, Rockson, I believe you.”

“We’re gonna fix you up now, pal. You’re coming with us—Rona and me—back to Century City. I can see a man of your courage and intelligence would be of great use to us there.”

“Thanks, Rockson—but I think I’m dying. So why don’t you two just—”

“You ain’t dying,” Rocks said curtly. “Believe me, I’ve seen more dead men than you could spit at, and
you’re
not one of them.”

Rock looked him over. No large puncture wounds, though there were cigarette burns across his chest. Hopefully he had just been tortured and not mortally wounded. The Nazis would have wanted to drag it out.